THIS thread got me wondering about this: Once a year the police department I work for has an annual inspection. ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY. The meeting is opened by a prayer from the department Chaplin.
Usually it just goes “Pastor Rotsap is going to say a prayer before we begin”. That doesn’t bother me at all. The prayer is usually less than a minute, and nobody is told they have to pray. Nobody even says “bow your head”. Nobody has ever been disiplined for not praying or for talking during the prayer.
But in this goofy sue crazy world I’m just wondering if this is asking for trouble.
It shouldn’t be, IMHO, but since almost every government body in the country has been doing it without fail since before 1776, 1789, and 1791, with no change in their practice since, it’s not going away any time soon.
I agree. I don’t think that my tax money should be spent to provide religious services for military personnel. If members want such services let them or their church pay for it. However, in view of the longstanding contrary precedent I don’t think my view of this is going to carry the day either.
Explain, exactly, how a servicemember floating in the middle of the persian gulf for more than 90 days straight is going to “pay” for religious services. Better yet, let us allow their local mosque to “pay” for a religious authority to fly onto the ship or into the middle of the battlefield, on an individual servicemember basis. Yes, excellent idea.
If saying their prayers is that important to them, then they’ll find a way to pay for it. Or if it’s that important that prayers be said, then there should be no shortage of volunteer clergy to go pray with them.
So far as I’ve ever been able to determine, the US Constitution prohibits government from establishing one, official, national religion. It prohibits a theocracy. It doesn’t prohibit folks from saying prayers, even government folks.
I hope that you realize that your tax money also is spent to provide everything from cars to housing to wraparound sunglasses to baseball tickets for military personnel. Just less directly.
Anyway, you’d be surprised how inclusive the military chapel service is. I grant you, the vast majority of military personnel–and, thus, the vast majority of chaplains and chapel services–are of the various Christian denominations. But Wicca is a surprisingly big hit at Lackland AFB for boot camp trainees, who also have the choice of attending Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, etc. services. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the military, but in boot camp and (I’m sure) on the battlefield, the chapel service–whichever one they choose–is in many cases what keeps the troops going from one week to the next. I’m not religious, but I was very religious (Jewish, FWIW) in basic training (where I had an unduly long stay), because it helped a lot. The military abides by the same religion rules as Congress: nobody has to participate, nobody suffers consequences by not participating in a particular service, nobody gets benefits by participating in the “right” one, etc. But when push comes to shove, even the most agnostic/humanistic trainees–read: me–would gladly take a couple hours of tranquil respite a week even at services for a range of faiths I didn’t believe in.
If you realized just how huge that weekly chapel service is for the morale of the troops, you’d have a different viewpoint, I’m sure of it. Unless, of course, you’re of the belief that your tax shouldn’t go towards defense at all, which is a whole 'nother thread.
Let’s make a template out of this and try it on for size with other examples. Keep in mind that I’m an agnostic saying this.
“If [verb] is that important to them, then they’ll find a way to pay for it. Or if it’s that important that [condition is met], then there should be no shortage of volunteer [profession] to [do job without payment] with/for them.”
Verb 1: having a home
Condition: they have a place to live
Profession: landlords
Verb 2: provide housing
Verb 1: shooting enemies
Condition: they can defend themselves on the battlefield
Profession: gun-makers
Verb 2: provide guns
Verb 1: flying planes
Condition: they get somewhere in particular
Profession: aircraft manufacturers
Verb 2: fly
Verb 1: sailing ships
Condition: they defend a coastline
Profession: boat builders
Verb 2: scrap together boats
To you, those things may not sound analogous to the ability to worship in a military context. But they are. Again, I’m not a religious person at all, but spiritual services are so vital to troop morale–again, this is something that I think must be seen to be truly understood–that I would no sooner deploy soldiers without it than I would send them out without ammo. If soldiers had to pay for housing, guns, ammo, planes, or ships, they’d either have to do without or be broke before they finished pulling on their cammies. Either that or the landlords/gunmakers/aircraft manufacturers/boatbuilders you know are a lot more generous than the ones I know. Military personnel don’t just “find a way” to pay for the things they need. Defense can’t work that way.
However, you wouldn’t find an argument here if you suggested that we shouldn’t have spent all that money flying them to the desert.
I can easily imagine that this would be considered unconstitutional. It meets two basic standards that I understand (IANAL) to be important. Attendance is mandatory and it is run by a government body (the police force). For instance, as I suspect most people are ware, schools cannot have prayers. Around here, even school boards are prohibited from opening with prayer-though many people are appealing that ruling. While no one is required to attend a school board meeting, it is the only official way for a citizen to petition or speak with the board, so the courts are saying that is close enough to mandatory. It is a crazy idea in my opinion, but officially sanctioned prayer is also offensive to some people. So yes I think your case could be a problem.
Of course not, but this threat doesn’t seem to be about “government folks” exercising their individual religious freedoms to say their own prayers or attend their own houses of worship or whatever. It’s about whether a government entity is allowed to officially sponsor prayer as part of its activities, given that government is supposed to be neutral on matters of religion.
And my best shot at a GQ answer to that would be the same as that of most others here: namely, even though it does rather have the appearance of government entanglement with religion, it’s probably constitutional because it’s always been done.
Hmmm. I’m pretty sure that baseball tickets are paid for out of (in the Navy the Morale, Welfare and Recreation fund) non-appropriated funds. The military gets cars for transportation and housing to live in. Why should I complain about that? And wraparound sunglasses are a personal expense item except for cetain MOS.
Irrelevant.
All irrelevant.
The various national churches would be able to raise the money to pay for such services in the military if they chose. And the question of non-military in the combat zone isn’t an insurmountable problem.
And I’ve agreed in advance that my protest resembles dropping a stone down a bottomless well. You never hear of it again. But I just had to make the protest.
I don’t think neutrality is Constitutionally required. Again, what is strictly prohibited is the establishment of an official “Religion of the United States of America.” Having a clergyman say a benediction at the opening of an annual Town Meeting is not against the rules.
Having a mandatory event, such as mentioned in the OP, and simply opening that event with a blessing is not the establishment of a religion. It’s not a madatory religious service. It’s a mandatory gathering that happens to include a brief religious component at the beginning.
It seems as though some folks wish to have the government actually prohibit all expressions of religion, which to me seems more oppressive.
I am a person who practices no religion, whose young child is not christened, and whose spouse is a pantheist who attends Unitarian Universalist services. In no way am I offended by having a Roman Catholic priest bless me once a year before I vote on whether or not to give the town’s firefighters another raise. . . In no way does that compromise anyone’s rights.
Actually, in no way shape or form are they remotely similar. (Or, when I bother to keep reading, “what Otto said.”) It might also interest you to know that David Simmons is a veteran, and is thus probably pretty aware of what the military spends money on.
The thing is, while the inspection is mandatory, nobody is required to pray. If someone walked out into the hallway during the prayer I can guarantee they wouldn’t get in trouble. It’s happened before. No problems.
Also, the Chief never says “okay, now we’re going to say a prayer” . He simply says the Chaplin is going to say one. What if during his prayer the Chaplin turned to those who had bowed their head and said “HEY! I’m the one praying here! Do your own praying on your own time!”
What if the Chief said " now officer Beitz is going to say a prayer", and I started praying for a raise? I’m not a religous leader. How would that violate others rights?
Because as we get fatter and comfortabler and boreder, we’ve suddenly realized that we all have the right to never be offended by anything, anywhere. So your smoking offends me, you bastard. Your prayer offends me, you bastard. You have malinformed opinions about Jewish people which has no effect on me except offending me, you bastard. You have the nerve to get 2mpg less than I do in my green car, you offensive bastard. Your saying “monkeys eat bananas” offends me because it’s some shaded reference to your racism, you bastard.
Yup; all we need is the amendment to our Constitution to make it official.
So the question is whether the mandatory inspection is more like the legislative session in *Marsh *or the school events in *Lee *and Santa Fe. The *Lee *Court found it significant that people were free to leave in Marsh. But by the time it got to Santa Fe it was willing to look past the voluntariness of the decision to attend, and focused on the realities of the situation:
On the other hand:
Lee and *Santa Fe * both involved schools and students, which the Court consider different to some extent.
